Shakespeare and Performance
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12880250 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Genevieve Love (Colorado College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 741-757 |
| Publication date | 2009-04-15 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Literature Compass (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1741-4113 • E-ISSN: 1741-4113 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00637.x |
| OpenAlex | W1979618366 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 19 |
The field of Shakespeare performance criticism, also called stage‐centered criticism, was founded about 30 years ago on the insistence that critical insights about Shakespeare's plays can best be drawn – indeed, at the extreme, should only be drawn – from performance, rather than from their written forms. Determined to transcend, confront, or illustrate the speciousness of a ‘stage versus page’ battle to which this basic assertion gave rise, some more recent performance critics, influenced by poststructuralist theory and performance studies, have sought productive ways of connecting procedures for meaning‐making on all sides of theatrical production – those of the theatrical practitioners who craft performances, those of the audiences who respond to them, and those of the performance critics who write about them. This essay begins by diagnosing performance criticism's characteristic mood – an affective ‘state of the field’. Both across its history and within different moments of that history, I suggest, performance criticism has moved between the celebration of plenitude and the mourning of loss. After framing performance criticism transhistorically through this lens of live presence and ephemeral disappearance, the essay sketches the field's development chronologically, structuring this sketch around two questions: What have performance critics thought themselves to be doing to performance (imagining it? documenting it?). And what have performance critics thought performances to be doing to the meanings of plays (discovering them? creating them?)
Aesthetics · Art · Assertion · Criticism · Epistemology · Field (mathematics · Framing (construction · Linguistics · Literature · Performance studies · Sketch · Computer Science · History · Philosophy · Psychology · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Theater, Performance, and Music History · Theatre and Performance Studies
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,1 |
| Citation span | 2016 - 2016 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |